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The talk on the weekend of Sept. 16-17
at Camp Democracy in the shadow of the Washington Monument on
the National Mall was of impeaching the president--and of looming
war with Iran.
I spoke on the morning of Sept.
17, along with John Nichols of the Nation, David Green of Hofstra,
former federal prosecutor and author Elizabeth de la Vega, and
long time anti-war activist Marcus Raskin. Later, in the afternoon,
a second group of people spoke on the same topic, including veteran
former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Jennifer van Bergen (who first
exposed Bush's secret "signing statements"), Michael
Avery, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and former Congresswoman
Elizabeth Holtzman (D-NY).
It was Holtzman who stole the
show, with the former member of the House impeachment panel that
drew up impeachment articles against Richard Nixon noting that
one of those three articles was for spying on American citizens.
Holtzman, who has a new book out on impeachment herself (The
Impeachment of George W. Bush,), said that when she and the other's
on that committee--Democrats and Republicans alike--unanimously
voted out those articles, which led to Nixon's resignation from
office, "I thought we had protected the Constitution for
generations to come."
And yet, scarcely one generation
later, the threat of presidential abuse of power is back, inclulding
the same crime of illegal spying--this time more seriously than
before.
Holtzmen observed that when
Nixon was ordered by the Supreme Court to produce the tape recordings
that the government had learned had been made in the Oval Office,
after some hesitation, he agreed, and his fate was sealed. This
time, she suggested ominously, Bush and his gang might decide
to ignore orders from the Supreme Court.
That, everyone agrees, would
be the moment when tyranny--the very thing that the Founding
Fathers feared most, and that was their motive in including an
impeachment clause in the Constitution--would be upon us.
As the NLG's Mike Avery noted,
at that point, the only remaining recourses for the American
People would be impeachment, or Thomas Jefferson's other remedy:
"revolution."
Speaking of arms, Ray McGovern
announced at the session the electrifying, if not wholly unexpected
news that Naval officers had notified his organization of former
intelligence officers aboutr secret orders that had gone out
for a Naval battle group to set sail immediately for the Persian
Gulf, with a planned ETA off the coast of Iran of Oct. 21--less
than three weeks before Election Day. (McGovern, before he resigned
in disgust during the Bush first term of office, had been in
charge of threat assessment at the CIA.)
"It would appear,"
one well-connected Washington source informed me after hearing
about the Naval maneuvers, "that the Bush administration's
internal polling is telling them that they are in serious trouble
in November and that they are getting desperate."
Maybe so. If Bush and his gang
cannot get all their crimes retroactively approved by the current
compliant Republican Congress, he and Cheney, fearing impeachment
and war crimes prosecution, may have decided to go with a "Hail
Mary" strategy--an aerial bombardment of Iran's nuclear
facilities just before Election Day designed to rally Americans
once more around the already abased and abused Flag.
This time, though, such a desperate,
jingoistic strategy may not work. In fact, if such an act of
unprovoked war leads Iran to unleash Shi'ia militias in Iraq
against American forces, it will lead to an exponential increase
in American casualties at a time that Americans are massively
turning against that war.
The potential for an attack
on Iran to become a new Tet is probably as great or greater than
the likelihood of its rallying the public around an already widely
discredited president and war.
Crucial in determining which
way things would go is how Democrats respond to news of a new
war in the offing. If they run true to form and start cheering
for more war, they will have nailed the coffin shut on the Democratic
Party as a functioning political organization. If they finally
stand up against this abuse of American power and say no to yet
another Bush war, the end to this nightmare could be in sight.
And which way the Democrats
react will depend on what the American people do between now
and any new Bush war.
As McGovern said darkly, "We
have only seven weeks to act to stop this from happening."
* *
*
Impeachment Talk: What Are
the Democrats Afraid Of?
NOTE: I gave a version
of this speech on Sunday morning at Camp Democracy, on the National
Block, just over a block from the White House.
If the Democratic Party manages
to gain at least 15 seats in the House of Representatives this
November, the party's leadership, and its leaders in the House,
will face a crisis.
Almost certainly, and in short
order, some member--perhaps a newly elected first-term Democrat
full of spit and vinegar--will introduce a bill of impeachment,
which will go straight to a House Judiciary Committee chaired
by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).
Rep. Conyers, who has a new
book out, The Constitution in Crisis, that lays out in detail
many of this president's impeachable crimes and Constitutional
transgressions, will unquestionably want to hold impeachment
hearings on that bill, and any others that would likely follow
it (there are currently 39 members of a House "impeachment
caucus" iinclluding Conyers).
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who
would be the Speaker of a Democratic House, has vowed that if
Democrats win the lower house of Congress, "impeachment
will be off the table." She and other Democratic heavyweights
like Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), head of the Democratic House Campaign
Committee, seem to think that impeachment is a bad strategy.
They recall the Republican attempt to impeach President Bill
Clinton, and how that backfired and led to seat losses for the
GOP in the following election.
But Republicans were simply
out to get President Clinton. They didn't have a case of high
crimes or misdemeanors to work with, only a lie about a sexual
liaison with an intern, and impeaching on that petty charge understandably
angered many voters (besides, Republicans did pretty well two
years later!).
Democratic leaders have it
all wrong when they see Bush's impeachment as just a replay of
the Clinton impeachment farce, though. Perhaps they've been listening
too long and too fearfully to Bush's Rasputin, Karl Rove, who
has been pouring his poison into their ears, warning that campaigning
in 2006 on a platform of impeaching President Bush would play
into Republican hands by "energizing the Republican base."
After all, what about energizing the Democratic base, and the
independent base, which calling for impeachment would surely
do, given the president's sagging popularity and mounting public
anger over the Iraq quagmire?
More importantly, though, is
the fact that any impeachment effort against this president would
involve, not petty malfeasance or illicit sex with interns, but
major issues involving the very survival of the Constitution
and of tripartite government.
Campaigning Democrats should
be telling voters this fall that this president lied the country
into a pointless, costly war. They should be telling voters he
has weakened the nation and strengthened its enemies by condoning
torture. Perhaps more importantly, though, since people will
argue those points, they should be saying how President Bush
has undermined the Founding Fathers' basic conception of three
co-equal branches of government that check and balance each other.
President Bush has for five years now claimed that as "commander
in chief" in a "war" on terror, he has the power
to ignore laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
and even key parts of the Constitution like the First, Fourth
and Sixth Amendments. He has claimed that as "commander
in chief" he has the power with the stroke of a pen to invalidate
all or parts of laws passed by Congress--over 850 of them, in
fact. He has claimed that as "commander in chief" he
has the power to arbitrarily deny prisoner of war protections
to people captured by U.S. forces anywhere in the world. (The
Supreme Court has shot down his "commander in chief"
claim with respect to POWs, and by inference, for all the other
actions of the president too, and a federal judge has said Bush
violated FISA--a felony.)
On the matter of the so-called
signing statements alone, Democrats in Congress have no alternative
but to impeach the president, unless they want to render themselves
vestigial. It wouldn't matter what progressive legislative agenda
a Democratic House (or even a Democratic House and Senate) might
pass; if the president could still issue signing statements invalidating
such legislation without a veto, they would be unable to enact
anything the president didn't want. Even Republicans should be
worried about this one, since the next president, elected in
2008, (who might well be a Democrat and even the dreaded Hillary!),
could simply cite Bush and continue the practice of signing statements
to ignore acts of Congress.
It's not just that this is
a winning campaign strategy. It is also important for Democrats
to be talking impeachment because that's the only way that the
corporate media, which are ignoring or scoffing at the idea of
impeachment, will report on the seriousness of the threat to
the country posed by Bush's assault on the Constitution. It's
also a matter of being honest with the voters.
What is Rep. Pelosi thinking?
Of course Democrats will impeach this president if they win control
of the House.
Besides, their oaths of office
mandate that they must. High Crimes and Misdemeanors aplenty
have been and are being committed by President Bush and his administration,
along with treason and bribery, and the only right thing to do
at this point is to hold impeachment hearings to determine what
was done and to mete out the appropriate penalty: impeachment.
CounterPunch
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